Granted, Trump and his open bigotry ascending to the top of the party have done enormous harm to the cause and might reverberate for the next couple of decades. [...]
Let’s get a few things straight. You won’t be able to win over black voters by simply explaining the benefits of conservatism better, or reminding black voters that Frederick Douglass, like Abraham Lincoln, was a Republican, or that a sizable percentage of the party voted for the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s and that the late Democratic Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd was a member of the Ku Klux Klan when he was a young man, while neglecting to remind listeners he spent the rest of his life apologizing and trying to make up for that misstep. [...]
That’s why any meaningful attempt to reach black voters won’t begin with claiming that Democratic policies have all failed—as Trump obnoxiously said the other week, telling African-Americans their lives are so terrible they have “nothing to lose” by voting for him—because that’s simply not true. In the years before the war on poverty began, 55 percent of black Americans lived in poverty—a number that has since been cut in half, down to roughly 26 percent. Not only that, 71 percent of single black moms lived in poverty in 1959, a number that is down to about 37 percent. (Curiously, no conservative I’ve read has ever noted that while the much-discussed black out-of-wedlock rate has been climbing the past few decades the rate of poverty in single-female-led black families has been going down.) [...]
In the minds of black voters, the GOP is hostile to health reform that is saving and improving their lives; hostile to Wall Street regulations designed to prevent a repeat of an economic downturn the American Civil Liberties Union calculates will be costing black Americans dearly for maybe another decade and a half; hostile to economic initiatives by the nation’s first black president; and pretend not to hear when communities of color scream that one of the most vital solutions to curbing gun violence is doing something about the guns themselves. When black people bring up any of these issues to many conservatives, they are either ridiculed, told that what they are experiencing can’t really be so, or that a simple adoption of conservative values and principles—whatever that means in the age of Trump—is the elixir for black people’s ills.
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